


judged against time

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Canon-typical Alcohol Consumption, Futurefic, Gen, I think this might be angst but ymmv, the author is in the US where Hanging Tree hasn't published yet, this fic will inevitably be jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 02:13:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8871697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: I took the train to the unofficial retirement party for Detective Superintendent Guleed.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [entropynchaos (katonahottinroof)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katonahottinroof/gifts).



> There are a couple of allusions to Terry Pratchett's works here. Given that Aaronovitch does that too, I feel no shame.
> 
> The title is from a [TLF Travel Alerts post](https://twitter.com/TlfTravelAlerts/status/792717219746775040).
> 
> A thank-you to beili for the beta.

I took the train to the pub that was listed in the email, but due to a signals issue ended up being unfashionably late. This was okay, though, because it was the nature of the job that someone was going to be even more unfashionably late than I was. 

The pub wasn't the local for Guleed's nick, a little more upmarket than that, and she was holding court at the far end with the rest of the coppers, sitting nursing a cup of tea. She could've been one of Beverley's sisters, if she'd looked anything at all like Mama Thames. 

"Where's the padawan?" she said, when I came to pay my respects.

"Paperwork," I said. "She'll be around later."

"And Kumar?"

"Signals issues," I said. "He's probably not going to make it."

"Why's he dealing with signals issues?" she said. "It's not just that it's spring or something, is it?"

"Nah," I said. "These signals issues are his shout."

"I don't want to know," she sighed, "and I don't have to anymore."

"Three cheers for Detective Superintendant Guleed," I said, "may she stay the last two weeks until safe retirement and thereby save us all from dealing with the weird bollocks a little longer."

"Don't jinx it," she said, but she was smiling. A man's not dead as long as his words are still spoken, and Seawoll had had a particularly good way of phrasing his opinion of the Folly.

I went and picked up a tea refill for her at the bar, and got myself a pint while I was at it. She accepted the tea refill graciously, and I was dismissed in favor of a couple of new PCs who were paying their respects.

I ended up sucked into a conversation with DS Bhargava, who updated me at length on a quickly-cooling case the team was working and which looked like it might grow Falcon involvement at some point if it didn't congeal first. Everyone, especially me and the Folly budget, was waiting until enough evidence appeared, but so far it was unforthcoming, and the Folly's budget was thus far safe.

 

Abigail – DS Kamara to everyone but the Folly – came by half an hour later, paperwork duly completed, and I bought her a pint, since I still remembered what it was like to be the most junior – the only junior, for that matter – member of the Folly, though it had been a long time.

"Abigail, " Guleed said, shaking her hand and half-standing to give her a one-armed hug. "I'm glad to see Grant's let you off early for the night."

"He's all right," she said. "And we cleared up the thing."

"The thing?" Guleed said.

"Yeah, the _thing_ ," Abigail confirmed, and waggled her eyebrows in the way that, given context clues and the fact that I'd assigned the paperwork, I could interpret as _that series of burglaries involving the carvings that let the bearer walk through walls_. Given that Guleed was on the murder team, she might not even have heard of it.

"Which thing is this?" Guleed said. "Is that the thing with the walls, or the thing with the forged books?" Which impressed me; I didn't think I'd mentioned it to her, although I knew that Abigail and Bhargava went out drinking together sometimes, so maybe Guleed had heard it that way.

"The walls," Abigail said, and grinned.

"Good for you," Guleed said. 

 

"How long've you been here?" Abigail asked twenty minutes later, while I was working on some of the snacks that were being handed around.

"A little under an hour, why?"

"I didn't think Kumar's signals issue was supposed to last this long," she said, sounding suspicious.

"Did you try calling him?" I said.

"I'm alerting my supervisory officer to potentially relevant information," she said, and grinned toothily. It hadn't worked on me since she was thirteen and definitely didn't work now.

"Right," I said, and dialed him.

He picked up on the third ring. "Grant?" he said.

"Do you need backup with your signals issue?"

"No," he said. "Unless you really like dianogas."

"I don't," I said, because whatever amateur practitioner had decided to edit the genes of his squids and release them into the sewers sometime back in 2030 was not our friend.

"You don't what?" Abigail said.

I tilted the phone away from my mouth and said to her, "Dianogas."

"Ugh," she said, and took a long swallow of her beer. 

"Abigail says ugh," I said. "Want her to come help?"

"That's okay. We're expecting some of the Quiet People as backup."

"Works for me," I said. For some reason they liked dianogas. I guess calamari made a nice change from bacon sarnies. "I'll give Guleed your regards."

"Cheers," he said, and signed off.

 

We only stayed for a couple of hours, in the end, because Guleed had to get home and the rest of us had jobs to do, or so she put it. I called Kumar again and he picked up with a whispered, "Hello, Peter."

"Success?" I asked.

"Squid kebab," he said. "Very chewy."

"Hip new food craze," I said. "Abigail and I are heading out."

"Thanks. Sorry I missed it."

"That's the job," I said. "Later."

"Later," he said, and hung up.

Abigail and I strolled back to the station, enjoying the night: there was a breeze, and the air had just enough of a chill to make you glad for a coat, but not so much you wanted more than that. The sky was clear, even if the light pollution meant you couldn't see the stars, but with a hint of moisture that meant there would, as always, be rain sometime in the future.

"Makes you think, doesn't it," Abigail said.

"What does?" I asked.

"You and Guleed were at Hendon together or something," she said, and I felt a low pain in my belly, old, but still tender when hit unexpectedly.

"No," I said. "We met after I joined the Folly." 

"Right," she said. "But it makes you think. There's her, with kids and a house and a career and everything. And then there's us."

"We all chose it," I said, though I thought zero probability of being promoted to management was a perk, personally.

"I guess so," she said. "But it still makes you think."

"I guess," I said.

"And it's good, I guess, that we can keep the Folly going. What with being perpetually understaffed due to reasons of Health & Safety," she continued. 

"We're not opening up Hogwarts again," I said, because Nightingale wasn't there to reprimand me for calling it that.

"I know that," she said. "I mean, did you look at the Hogwarts curriculum? They didn't even teach them basic survival skills. No wonder their society was so isolated."

 

We got home without incident or signals issues _or_ mutated squid, which I deemed a success, and I went and took a bath.

The bathroom mirror, next to the ancient and familiar claw-foot tub, was clouded with steam when I got out. I wiped it clean and looked at myself in the mirror. 

Abigail had a point. It wasn't the lack of career advancement prospects that bothered me. It was that feeling of being left behind. You can only be young for so long before it gets tiring, and I'd been thirty-five for a good twenty years. 

There was never a good time to stop doing magic and get old, that was all there was to it. There was always something new to discover, and well, I was still a copper as well as a wizard: there was always another stupid bugger who needed to get nicked. I still wanted to be one of the team to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Dianoga' is the in-universe name for the creature in the garbage compactor in the original Star Wars.


End file.
